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You find yourself in the desert, full of strange creatures, floating orbs and cubes. There’s a literal sandman surfing around the area and monoliths in the distance. In the face of this bizarreness, what can you do? Simple, put on the most kickass rave you can! This is Beat the Game.

Review

Whoever created Beat the Game, whoever came up with the premise, is completely insane, or was tripping on something truly funky. It reminds me of some of the weirdest stop-motion animations I’ve seen over the years. There’s a Swamp Thing-esque creature playing bass with roots, polyhedral people, a shy catgirl and a corpse on a lawnchair that only shows up at night. Oh, and that’s without mentioning the Fridge that makes it night-time.

It’s bonkers and I love it along with the character design, something of a hipster French prisoner with gigantic goggles and sound gear. It’s gloriously trippy.

This is the only area you explore…it’s minuscule.

I would have liked for the interesting visual design to have a matching interesting game design but alas that was too much to expect. Beating Beat the Game was something I did in about 15 minutes. It’s ludicrously short, and it’s not even a great short experience but a profoundly boring one.

Unlike other Point & Click adventure games, where you collect items and solve inventory or logic puzzles, in Beat the Game all items that you collect are used automatically at the right spots, taking a giant chunk of what might have been interesting gameplay and throwing it right out of the window.

The world is truly bizarre, which is the best part.

The rest of the game consists on collecting sounds from the floating bits in the background using your sound collector, and from the automatic use of items or interactions with certain locales in your very limited environment.

Once you have them all, you can switch to night-time and put on your rave, which has the only interesting mechanic, where the game swiftly tells you which sounds to play and you must switch them around, disabling and enabling them and shifting the strength of the effect on the overall composition.

There is no real soundtrack, but you can create your own with the sound mixer.

If you do well, you increase your success bar and move along to the end of the game, where the character hopes on a jeep with a giant head and drives off for new adventure…that we don’t get to play.

That’s it, that’s all. It’s such a disappointing end to what had been a rather bland experience.

I’m all for artsy games, I really am, but for the love of the gods, give them some substance. This didn’t feel like a game, but a demo of one.

Once the show is over, you ride into the dawn in the weirdest jeep ever!

Conclusion

No, this is just..no! I would have rather seen this is as a short film than a really short game!